Chinese restaurants are an integral part of the prairie experience, found in communities of all sizes. They may take the shape of an upscale banquet hall, or a hole-in-the-wall cafe run by families, and feature names like Modern Cafe, or Eddie’s Cafe and Confectionary.

Starting Saturday, April 2o and running until April 27, 2014, the Royal Alberta Museum hosts a new exhibit, Chop Suey on the Prairies: A History of Chinese Restaurants in Alberta.

The exhibit looks at who worked in and owned the restaurants, and who ate there. It also plumbs the cultural impact of Chinese restaurants, the experiences of their owners, and the strong connection that Albertans feel to these restaurants, even now.

For information on the exhibit, including prices, call 780-453-9100, or 310-0000 for toll-free service.

The Edmonton Journal’s Bill Mah grew up in the Chinese restaurant owned by his parents in Killam, Alberta. He shared some of his story with readers more than two years ago, when details of the upcoming exhibit were first announced. I’ve cut and pasted it here for you to read.

I grew up in an iconic institution on the prairie landscape. Who knew?

For me, the little red-brick restaurant on the main street of Killam during the 1970s was the place where my mother and father cooked and served breakfast, lunch and dinner, mostly on their own while raising three young boys. The restaurant was also our home, since we ate family meals in the kitchen and slept downstairs.

But Eddie’s Cafe and Confectionary and hundreds of Chinese restaurants like my parents’ are important pieces of Alberta’s history and culture, the Royal Alberta Museum says.

The Chinese restaurant will be the main dish of a new travelling exhibit this fall and a larger show planned for the museum for next year.

Chinese restaurants are “iconic institutions” of nearly every Alberta community, from farming villages to the bustling Chinatowns of Edmonton and Calgary, and the museum wants to hear from Albertans who have related stories or objects they’re willing to share.

“For me, they’re interesting because it really encapsulates how people adapted on both ends,” said Linda Tzang, the museum’s curator of cultural communities.

“It’s how Chinese people came here and adapted, trying to look for success. It’s also how the community adapted to influx and change.”

Tzang would like to hear from customers as well as the people, both Chinese and non-Chinese, who worked in them.

“What was it like being a white woman working in a Chinese restaurant in the ’30s or ’40s?” Tzang asked.

“Traditionally, we’ve always looked at this story from the Chinese point of view — the families who owned restaurants, but for me, the really exciting thing about Chinese restaurants is that they’re really a North American story. They’re about the community that supported them as much as about the family.”

Tsang wants to find out what these restaurants mean to the community now and in years past. “At the time there was a lot of discrimination, yet these small towns were all excited to have a Chinese restaurant. What made that happen?”

There are more Chinese restaurants in North America than all fast-food outlets combined, Tzang said.

Many Chinese immigrants worked in or opened restaurants in the early years because they were prohibited from entering many professions. “Once they came off the railways, their options were basically labourers or domestic work,” Tzang said.

“If you’re a houseboy or a cook, what do you know? You know how to cook and you’ve been making western food.”

Many Chinese restaurateurs sold shares to friends, relatives or a family association under a communal business model to raise capital, she said.

Although small towns may have considered their Chinese restaurants exotic, they often served fare such as hamburgers, or dishes unheard of in China, such as chop suey.

“In the course of doing research for this project, we realized that every locality has their own Chinese specialty which most new immigrants would not recognize as Chinese food, but it’s become the standard. In Alberta, it’s ginger beef and green onion cakes.”

Travelling exhibits will tour small museums across the province starting in October with the dual objectives of sharing stories the museum has already collected and to encourage Albertans to contribute their own experiences with Chinese restaurants, both existing and past.

These loans or donations will be used to develop a larger exhibition at the Royal Alberta Museum, opening in 2012.

Despite an onslaught of quick-service food franchises, Chinese restaurants survive because they are affordable to start, even though the model is fluctuating, Tzang said. “One small town called me and said, ‘Our Chinese restaurant is owned by a Vietnamese family. Does that count?’ I thought, it counts if you think of it as the Chinese restaurant.”

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